In a meeting room on the second floor of the new Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity building, organization president Sue Haigh happily pulls out a magic marker and scribbles the word “paperless” on the wall.

“We’ll be paperless,” said Haigh with a chuckle, showing off how easily the marker disappears from the Wink dry-erase paint. “The idea is you’ll write your notes, you’ll take a picture of them with your phone, and you’ll just send them over to your computer.”

Dry-erase walls, located throughout the new three-story building at University and Prior avenues in St. Paul, aren’t the only innovations that Haigh believes make her organization’s new headquarters a model for “transit-oriented design” up and down the corridor.

Haigh, who doubles as chairwoman of the Metropolitan Council, is the latest tenant to set up shop along the Met Council’s new 11-mile Central Corridor light-rail transit line, or Green Line. The Habitat HQ, which cost $6.5 million for construction and land acquisition, is denser and taller than the two-story building it replaced, and it sits pressed up close to the sidewalk, with parking in back.

In short, the structure has the same strong exterior presence and interior design approaches that Haigh and other transit advocates would like to see up and down University Avenue. The goal is to pack more housing, employers and environmental efficiencies into Central Corridor construction, creating more vibrancy and better access to jobs and services.

City officials have smiled at the concept. In April 2011, the St. Paul City Council approved broad changes to the city’s zoning code to allow construction heights along the southside of University Avenue of up to 75 feet between Snelling Avenue and Lexington Parkway, or even higher with a conditional-use permit. Other segments of University Avenue face different height restrictions.

In the area where Habitat is located, the maximum height for “mixed-use” or non-residential buildings is 55 feet, though a conditional use permit could raise that to 90 feet.

In keeping with Habitat’s goal of creating simple, dignified, low-cost and increasingly energy-efficient housing, the new headquarters carries plenty of almost comic flourishes. Employee mailboxes are literal rows of old-fashioned U.S. Postal Service home mailboxes. Employee lockers are a series of rescued high school lockers.

And carpeting has been stitched together from triangles of rescued fabric, which cuts down on maintenance costs — each triangle can be individually replaced if it’s dirtied or damaged. On the ground level, repurposed industrial garage doors roll up to reveal meeting rooms on either side of a central hallway.

Matt Haugen, a spokesman for Twin Cities Habitat, said the organization will save roughly $20,000 per year in energy costs as a result of its efficiencies. The building’s walls and meeting rooms are decorated with the names of donors that made the facility possible, including 3M, EcoLab, Valspar and the St. Paul Foundation.

The board of directors even donated money to create a special “Sue Haigh Fireside Room” on the ground level, which is now decorated with pictures of families that have benefited from Habitat houses and mortgages. The building will offer homebuying classes, foreclosure-prevention counseling and its traditional low-interest financing for homes built with mostly volunteer labor.

In the metro, the nonprofit constructs 55 homes per year, or more than one per week. The former headquarters in Minneapolis, also located off University Avenue at 3001 Fourth St. S.E., is currently for sale.

Frederick Melo came to the Pioneer Press in 2005 and brings an aggressive East Coast attitude to St. Paul beat reporting. He spent nearly six years covering crime in the Dakota County courts before switching focus to the St. Paul mayor's office, city council, and all things neighborhood-related, from the city's churches to its parks and light rail. A resident of Hamline-Midway, he is married to a Frogtown woman. He Tweets manically at @FrederickMelo

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